A liking for flavor and taste relating to food varies from consumer to consumer, and can change constantly with age, for example. Moreover, with circulation of a wide variety of foods and foodstuffs accompanying the development of physical distribution of recent years, and increasing concern about the safety of food these days, the consumer's taste for food is changing quickly and becoming diversified today.
In response to such diversification of the consumer's taste, it has become imperative for the liquor and food industry to develop liquors and foods with various characteristics in order to expand the range of selection for the consumer. It is the present state, therefore, that goods that agree with the consumer's taste are being developed by selecting various raw materials and changing manufacturing conditions in order to create various flavors.
Such a situation is not an exception for the industry of alcoholic beverages and foods for which malt is used as the raw material (e.g. brewed beverages such as beer and happoshu (low-malt beer), distilled liquors such as whiskey, and confectionery such as pop sweets).
One of the flavors that the consumer can taste in suck alcoholic beverages and foods made from malt is what is called acridness. Acridness is a flavor (oral cavity stimulant) that is deeply related, in the case of beer drinks, to taste when taken into the mouth, through the throat, and to aftertaste. Conventionally, the substances leading to a stimulus in the oral cavity such as acridness (hereinafter called oral cavity stimulating substances) have been considered to be oxalic add and homogentisic acid in vegetables such as bamboo shoot and spinach (see Patent Document 1).
Patent document 1: Japanese Patent No. 3390770